BREAKING NEWS: Feds Bust 25 Illegal Alien Sexual Predators in L.A.

By  Jim Kouri

Special to DavidKinchen.com

 
A Mexican national who attempted to kidnap a seven-year-old girl from a local Laundromat is one of 25 persons arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Los Angeles during the past three days as part of a joint enforcement effort with the United States Attorney’s Office targeting foreign nationals with prior convictions for sex offenses, many of them involving children.

Four of the foreign nationals taken into custody during this week’s operation have been deported from the United States previously. The group includes two Salvadorans, a Honduran, and a Mexican national. The defendants are being prosecuted by the US Attorney’s newly created Domestic Security and Immigration Crimes Section for reentering the United States after deportation, a felony that carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Earlier this week, the four were ordered detained without bond. A fifth man, a Salvadoran national convicted of lewd and lascivious acts on a child under 14, also faces criminal charges, but he remains at large.

The sex offenders being prosecuted for felony reentry include Jose Angel Pakas-Murcia, 46, a Honduran national who was deported in 1995 after serving time for sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl in Florida. ICE agents arrested Pakas-Murcia Tuesday at the local car dealership where he worked as a manager in the parts department.

The remaining 21 sex offenders — including 17 Mexican nationals, three Salvadorans, and a Filipino — are being detained by ICE and will be placed in administrative immigration proceedings. Of the 21, 14 are legal permanent residents whose criminal convictions make them subject to deportation. The remaining seven entered the country illegally.

The arrests are the latest local enforcement action carried out as part of Operation Predator, an ongoing ICE initiative to identify, investigate, arrest and, in the case of foreign nationals, deport those who prey on children, including human traffickers, international sex tourists, and Internet pornographers.

The foreign nationals arrested on administrative immigration violations include Gabino Chavez-Rosales, a 43-year-old Mexican national who was convicted in California state court of lewd acts with a minor. The charges stem from an incident where the Glendale resident tried to kidnap a young girl who was playing in a Laundromat parking lot. Also arrested on immigration violations was Jose Luis Rodriguez-Lucatero, 41, who entered the United States illegally from Mexico and was convicted for the attempted rape of a 15-year-old girl.

“These pedophiles pose a serious threat to the well-being of our children, our families, and our communities,” said Robert Schoch, special agent-in-charge for the ICE office of investigations in Los Angeles. “We will continue to work closely with the United States Attorney’s Office and our other law enforcement partners to target those who prey on the children of this community. In the case of foreign nationals who commit predatory offenses, we cannot only take them off of the streets, but we can seek to have them sent out of the country.”

Meanwhile, ICE agents are continuing to search for the fifth criminal suspect sought in the operation, Alejandro Rodriguez Villegas, 50, of Los Angeles. The Salvadoran, who was sentenced to five years in prison for lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14, was previously deported in 1997.

Since ICE launched Operation Predator in July of 2003, the agency has arrested more than 8,200 sex offenders nationwide. More than 1,100 of those arrests were made by ICE agents in the Los Angeles area.

Operation Predator is part of ICE’s expanded interior immigration enforcement strategy, which focuses on identifying and removing criminal aliens, immigration fugitives, and other immigration violators from the United States. The agency’s top priority is arresting and removing foreign nationals who pose a threat to public safety or national security.

 

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Jim Kouri  is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and he’s a staff writer for the New Media Alliance (thenma.org). He’s a former chief at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed “Crack City” by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. In addition, he served as director of public safety at a New Jersey university and director of security for several major organizations. Kouri has appeared as on-air commentator for more than 100 TV and radio news and talk shows including Oprah, McLaughlin Report, CNN Headline News, MTV, Fox News, etc.  His book “Assume The Position” is available at Amazon.Com. Kouri’s own website is located at http://jimkouri.U.S.

                                         

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Will the Boat Sink the Water?’ Explores the Other China That News Accounts Neglect: Nation’s 900 Million Heavily Taxed Peasants

Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic

Water holds up the boat; water may also sink the boat – Emperor Taizong (600-649 C.E., Tang Dynasty)

Hinton, WV (HNN) – If you believe the mainstream media – and why should you be so foolish as to do that? – China will soon overtake the U.S. as a major military and economic super power. Just look at the gleaming cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong, they tell us. Take a look at your local Wal-Mart: Just about everything there is made in China.

Chinese journalists Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi returned to Chen’s native province of Anhui, one of China’s poorest – and the setting for “The Good Earth” by West Virginia native Pearl Buck — to undertake a three-year survey of what had happened to the peasants there, asking the question: “Have the peasants been betrayed by the revolution undertaken in their name by Mao and his successors?”

The short answer is “YES” and the reportage in “Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of China’s Peasants” (PublicAffairs, 256 pages, $25.00). Translated by Zhu Hong, with an introduction by former Washington Post Beijing Bureau Chief John Pomfret, the book is a masterpiece of investigative journalism. It’s as if Seymour Hersh’s wife were an investigative journalist as accomplished as Sy and accompanied her husband on their collaborative work.

Twenty years ago, when collective farms were being abandoned and a form of private ownership was adopted by the Beijing regime, there was hope that the heavy hand of Communism was coming to an end, the authors say. The reality is that the 900 million peasants of China – in a nation of 1.3 billion – are eking out a barely subsistence life on tiny plots that are heavily taxed by local Communist cadres – officials who are living the good life at the expense of the peasants, the authors say.

Just about anyone who can migrates to the cities to work in the factories that keep the Wal-Marts and the Target stores full of merchandise. They do this illegally, because freedom of movement – something taken for granted virtually everywhere else — is not permitted in China. Residence permits are required to live in the cities where the jobs are and they’re not usually granted to peasants from Hunan or Anhui provinces, to name just two.

The book was published by the state publishing company, The People’s Literature Publishing House, in December 2003 and was an immediate best-seller, with 250,000 copies sold – a remarkable achievement for a nonfiction book anywhere. This convinced the regime to suspend publication. Pirated editions appeared – more than 7 million of them, the authors note in a preface – and the resulting publicity brought major-league harassment to the couple.

The authors describe in great detail the corruption of the Chinese hinterland, how petty officials grow prosperous off the backs of the nation’s peasants. A student of the coalfields of West Virginia and Kentucky would recognize many of the elements Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi describe so well. The corruption of the officials brought to mind a book I recently read and reviewed called “Don’t Buy Another Vote: I Won’t Pay for a Landslide” that described the political corruption of West Virginia that persists up to this day.

In attempts to increase the tax base, ambitious county and township officials set up factories as varied as chemical, rubber and reed mats in rural areas. The authors describe several such efforts – all failures. The freeloading of the cadres is legendary, as the accounts by the authors of free meals and stiffed restaurant owners reveal. It would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that many of the peasants don’t get enough to eat.

Anyone who protested the burden of taxes on just about anything imaginable and many things that were unimaginable would be beaten, robbed, arrested, even killed, the authors point out, with many cases vividly described. Anyone complaining to higher authorities would find themselves harassed even more.

Much of this results from an overlay of Communism – not an efficient way of running a country in the first place – on the essential feudalism that has existed in China since the 15th Century, at least, the authors say. Before the Communists took power in 1949, the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek tolerated warlords and petty bureaucrats and not much has changed for the majority of China’s peasants, the authors say.

Both the authors spring from peasant backgrounds, so they know the territory: Wu Chuntao was born in 1963 in Hunan; Chen Guidi, her husband, was born in 1943 in Anhui. Wu and Chen are members and respected writers of the Hefei Literature Association. Mr. Chen received the Lu Xun Literature Achievement Award—one of the most important literary prizes in China. Both authors have received awards from the journal Contemporary Age for groundbreaking reportage, and “Will the Boat Sink the Water?” won the 2004 Lettre Ulysses Prize for the art of reportage.

Pomfret’s introduction is a valuable addition to the book, as is the authors’ preface that describes how the book came into being. There’s a timeline of Communist China and the book is indexed. It’s a breezy, journalistic book to read – and one that doesn’t spare the four-letter words. As Pomfret says, the book is “an important antidote to the boosterish pablum churned out by many China experts these days. It’s a street-level look at the downside, and the dark side, of China’s economic juggernaut.”

Publisher’s web site: http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com

PARALLEL UNIVERSE: Indianapolis: Affordable Housing; L.A.: Anything But! Median Income Higher in Indy than in L.A.

By David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Network

Hinton, WV – Bringing to sharp relief the craziness of the housing market in the U.S., a new survey shows that Indianapolis, IN maintained its standing at the most affordable major housing market in the nation, while the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, CA area retained the dubious crown of the least affordable metro area for the SEVENTH straight quarter.

RISMEDIA released the survey Aug. 24. It’s called the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index (HOI) and it covers Q2 of 2006.

“Today’s HOI reading indicates that 40.6 percent of new and existing homes that were sold during the second quarter were affordable to families earning the national median income of $59,600,” said NAHB President David Pressly, a home builder from Statesville, N.C. “This is just below the 41.3 percent of homes that were affordable to median-income earners in the first quarter and tied to the somewhat higher mortgage rates that prevailed in the April – June period.”

According to the survey: “In the nation’s most affordable major housing market of Indianapolis, 87.4 percent of homes sold in the second quarter were affordable to families earning the area’s median household income of $65,100. The median sales price of all homes sold in Indianapolis during that time was $120,000, which is up from $113,000 in the previous quarter and equivalent to the median sales price for Indianapolis homes sold in the final quarter of 2005.”

What about L.A. (I noticed fast-growing Glendale, northeast of L.A. has been added to the traditional Los Angeles-Long Beach designation), where $120,000 won’t even buy you a garage: “There, just under 2 percent of new and existing homes sold during the second quarter were affordable to those earning the area’s median family income of $56,200. The median sales price of all homes sold in the area during the period was $521,000.

Aside from the astonishingly high housing prices in L.A. – something I knew first hand from covering real estate at the L.A. Times from 1976 to 1990 – a number jumped out at me: The median family income in Indy — $65,000 – is almost $10,000 a year more than the L.A. median of $56,200. The survey doesn’t mention the reason, but I’m willing to bet it’s a factor of the large number of immigrants in the L.A. area, many of them illegals from Mexico and Central America. Illegals tend to drive the median income figures way down. I doubt that Indianapolis has that many illegals from South of the Border – yet.

Meanwhile, nationwide housing affordability edged slightly downward as the median price of all homes sold in the period remained unchanged and a slight up-tick was registered in the average mortgage rate, Pressly, the North Carolina builder said.

“Today’s HOI reading indicates that 40.6 percent of new and existing homes that were sold during the second quarter were affordable to families earning the national median income of $59,600,” said Pressly. “This is just below the 41.3 percent of homes that were affordable to median-income earners in the first quarter and tied to the somewhat higher mortgage rates that prevailed in the April – June period.”

Not surprisingly, most of the nation’s most affordable housing is where people don’t want to live, thanks to departing jobs and problems in the auto industry. This undoubtedly accounts for the inclusion “near the top of the list for affordable major metros” of Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Michigan; Grand Rapids-Wyoming, Michigan; Buffalo-Niagara Falls, New York; and Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, Ohio-Pennsylvania – in that order.”

The survey: ”Five smaller metro markets outranked all others in terms of housing affordability during the second quarter, including Springfield, Ohio, as well as four Michigan locations: Bay City, Lansing-East Lansing, Saginaw-Saginaw Township North, and Battle Creek, respectively.” All of these metros are in the so-called “Rust Belt” of my native Midwest.

Indianapolis (city population about 780,000; Metro, about 1.6 million) has become a major financial and distribution center, and is thriving like few other heartland cities. It’s the home of Eli Lilly, one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical firms. My first newspaper job was in the Hoosier state, in Hammond, and my second was in Bloomington, about 50 miles south of Indy. All in all, Indiana is doing better than most of its neighbors.

It’s no surprise to me that the most unaffordable housing in the nation is on either the West Coast or the New York-New Jersey area of the East Coast: “Other major metros at the bottom of the housing affordability chart included Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine, California; San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, California; New York-White Plains-Wayne, New York-New Jersey; and Stockton, California, in that order,” the HOI survey disclosed.

Nor is this surprising to a veteran of the California real estate scene: “Among metro areas smaller than 500,000 people, every entry at the bottom of the affordability chart was located in California, starting with Salinas as the least affordable and followed by Merced, Modesto, Santa Cruz-Watsonville and Santa Barbara-Santa Maria, California, respectively.”

Editor’s Note: David M. Kinchen has been a member of the National Association of Real Estate Editors since 1971 and was president in 1984. The accompanying photos picture two houses in the Beech Grove suburb of Indianapolis listing for about $123,000, an older house with over 2,000 square feet and a newer ranch with about 1,500 square feet.

GUEST COMMENTARY: Multiculturalism: Endangering British Society

 

By  Sir Ronald Sanders

Special to DavidKinchen.com

Multiculturalism is an international phenomenon by which nation states of different religions, traditions and customs maintain their individual cultural identity while engaging in a range of peaceful activity such as trade, investment, tourism and sports.

 While it works in an international context, unmanaged multiculturalism does not work within nation states.

 For instead of contributing to a strong single society, it fragments society and weakens the nation through the creation of separate groups with individual identities and competing values and traditions.

 Britain is now an example of how unmanaged multiculturalism can disrupt a society.  The bombings of London trains last year and the alleged plot a few weeks ago to blow up several trans-Atlantic flights by disenchanted persons born in Britain of foreign parents demonstrates the dangers of multiculturalism.  Their loyalty is not to Britain or to British values, for both their birth and existence in Britain are incidental – not integral – to their lives.

 When immigrants enter a new society particularly one in which the language and customs are different from the land of their birth, the government should make provision for them to learn the language and to gain knowledge of the cultural norms.  They should not be left simply to muddle through the system. 

 It is also particularly important that, having made the decision to leave their native countries for a new society, immigrants make the conscious decision to integrate into it.  And, if they find the norms and customs of their new society repugnant, they ought to return to the societies from which they came.  If not, they will have consigned themselves to existing in cultural ghettoes outside of mainstream society.

 In many British cities, such cultural ghettoes exist now.

 In the past, governments found it politically convenient not to manage multiculturalism.  Instead, they submitted to the extreme views of religious and other leaders to permit separate schools and the development of separate communities.  It was convenient for governments, and desirable for community and religious leaders, to push immigrant groups into their own separate neighbourhoods.

 Thus, no funds were allocated to integrate new immigrants into the school system, to ensure that they learned English, to make compulsory knowledge of the history and development of their new country, to create laws that gave minorities equal opportunities both for education and employment, and laws that stopped racial discrimination particularly by law enforcement agencies.

 Such laws as have been enacted came too late to quell the resentment that had built up in the separate communities over the years.

 The vast technological advances of the last few years particularly in satellite television and the Internet have also reinforced the separateness of these communities.  They watch television programmes in their own language and they follow events – including about the country in which they live – through the news programmes and websites originating in the countries from which they came. 

 Over the last few years, schools for Asians have become “faith schools”.  In the case of Muslims, for example, children attend separate schools wearing Muslim dress and following the Muslim religion. 

 And, State schools are also, by and large, separate schools.  For in deprived areas where mostly ethnic minorities live, the student body is also mostly ethnic minorities.

 So, education and technology, instead of becoming integrating influences, became a further means of creating real separateness in British society. 

 Fortunately, despite the weaknesses in the system, the vast majority of immigrants – while maintaining aspects of their culture – have adapted to British society and integrated into it as best they could.

 But, a reality of Britain today is the existence of persons from ethnic minorities who are born “in” their society but are not “of” it.  The challenge that faces the government is how to manage multiculturalism so that it does not reinforce separateness.  

 Religious tolerance must continue but not to the point of separate “faith” schools; schools that are predominantly white should be required to accept more ethnic minorities; scholarships should also be provided for bright and talented children from ethnic minorities; discrimination, particularly by law enforcement agencies, should be rigorously policed to stop abuse; and funds should be provided to rehabilitate deprived areas to create employment and higher standards of living.  In other words, minorities must be made to feel part of British society.

 All this will also require the active cooperation of the leaders of ethnic groups who should incorporate into the guidance of their communities the notion of a strong and common national British culture undiluted by many flourishing and different religious strands and customs.

 Without such an approach, multiculturalism will do nothing more in Britain than promote discontent and weaken the nation; as it will in every other country in which it is not managed for the good of the society as a whole.

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Sir Ronald Sanders is a business executive and former Caribbean Ambassador to the World Trade Organisation who publishes widely on Small States in the global community.

Responses to: ronaldsanders29@hotmail.com

BREAKING NEWS: Detroit Area Home to Many in Alleged Criminal Conspiracy to Fund Hezbollah

By  Jim Kouri

 
Special to DavidKinchen.com

 
While U.S. Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, proclaimed himself neutral — “I don’t take sides for or against Hezbollah; I don’t take sides for or against Israel,” he said — there appears to be problems of Hezbollah activities within his own backyard.

A Dearborn Heights MI, man pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges of conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and using illegally obtained funds to help finance the terrorist group Hezbollah.

Youssef Aoun Bakri, 36, pleaded guilty in federal court as he stood before US District Judge Gerald E. Rosen. The original indictment charged Bakri and other defendants with:   operating a criminal enterprise to traffic in contraband cigarettes and counterfeit goods, producing counterfeit cigarette tax stamps, and laundering money.

Most troubling was the fact that some of the profits made from the illegal enterprise were given to Hezbollah, a designated foreign terrorist organization (DFTO), according to the indictment.

Bakri faces maximum penalties of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Two other defendants, Imad Majed Hamadeh, 51, of Dearborn Heights and Theodore Schenk, 73, of Miami Beach, Fla., have already entered guilty pleas to basically the same indictment.

“Fighting terrorism and keeping our citizens safe from its reach, is the Department of Justice’s number-one priority. Raising money for designated terrorist organizations, like Hezbollah, is a serious crime which will be vigorously pursued in the Eastern District of Michigan,” US Attorney Stephen Murphy said.

“Together, we will use all of the legal tools available to us to disrupt criminal activity that funds terrorist organizations,” he said.

According to Brian M. Moskowitz, special agent in charge of the Immigration & Customs Enforcement’s Office of Investigations in Detroit, “ICE will continue to work with other law enforcement agencies to dismantle criminal organizations. Racketeering is a serious crime, and ICE will continue to investigate those who exploit our borders to facilitate their criminal enterprise.”

The indictment charges that between 1996 and 2004, a group of individuals worked together in a criminal enterprise to traffic in contraband cigarettes, counterfeit Zigzag rolling papers (used for rolling marijuana cigarettes), and counterfeit Viagra; to produce counterfeit cigarette tax stamps; to transport stolen property; and to launder money.

The enterprise was international in scope and operated from Lebanon, Canada, China, Brazil, Paraguay and the United States.

Also named in the indictment and awaiting a January 7, 2007 trial dates are: Karim Hassan Nasser, 37, of Windsor, Ontario; Fadi Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud, 33, of Dearborn, Mich.; Majid Mohamad Hammoud, 39, of Dearborn Heights; Jihad Hammoud, 47, of Dearborn; Ali Najib Berjaoui, 39, of Dearborn; Mohammed Fawzi Zeidan, 41, of Canton, Mich.; and Adel Isak, 37, of Sterling Heights, Mich.

Others charged in the indictment, who are currently wanted as fugitives and believed to have left the United States are: Imad Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud, 37 of Lebanon, formerly of Dearborn; Hassan Ali Al-Mosawi, 49, of Lebanon; Hassan Hassan Nasser, 36, of Windsor, Ontario; Ali Ahmad Hammoud, 64, of Lebanon; Karim Hassan Abbas, 37, formerly of Dearborn; Hassan Mohamad Srour, 30, of Montreal, Quebec; Naji Hassan Alawie, 44, of Windsor, Ontario; and Abdel-Hamid Sinno, 52, of Montreal, Quebec.

US law enforcement is coordinating their efforts with the Canadian intelligence and security
services and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to capture the fugitives who escaped into Canada.

The indictment alleges that Imad Hammoud, along with his partner, Hassan Makki, ran a multimillion dollar a year contraband cigarette-trafficking organization headquartered in the Dearborn, Mich., area between 1996 and 2002.

Makki pleaded guilty in 2003 in federal district court in Detroit to racketeering and providing material support to Hezbollah. Some of the cigarettes were supplied to the organization by Mohamad Hammoud, who was convicted in 2002 in federal district court in Charlotte, NC, of, among other crimes, racketeering and providing material support to Hezbollah.

Makki and Mohamad Hammoud, who were not charged in the indictment, were identified as un-indicted coconspirators. They both are currently serving prison sentences in related cases for their activities in this matter.

The indictment charges that the group would obtain low-taxed or untaxed cigarettes in North Carolina and the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation in New York and bring them into Michigan and the State of New York for the purpose of evading tens of millions in state cigarette taxes. The enterprise obtained large profits by reselling the cigarettes at market prices in Michigan and New York. The enterprise sometimes used counterfeit tax stamps to make it appear as though state taxes had been paid.

The indictment additionally charges that portions of the profits made from the illegal enterprise were forwarded to Hezbollah. Some members of the enterprise charged a “Resistance Tax,” a set amount over black-market price per carton of contraband cigarettes which their customers were told would be going to Hezbollah. Some members of the enterprise also solicited money from cigarette customers for the “orphans of martyrs” program run by Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon to support the families of persons killed in Hezbollah suicide attacks and other terrorist operations.

The US Secretary of State has designated Hezbollah a foreign terrorist organization. An entity may be designated as a foreign terrorist organization if the Secretary of State finds that: (1) the organization is a foreign organization; (2) the organization engages in terrorist activity; and (3) the terrorist activity of the organization threatens the security of US nationals or the national security of the United States.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Intelligence Division of the New York City Police Department maintain that Hezbollah terrorist cells are deeply entrenched in the United States. One of Hezbollah’s largest headquarters is located in Toronto, Canada, but they claims they are members of the political-wing of Hezbollah and not its military-wing.

 

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Jim Kouri  is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and he’s a staff writer for the New Media Alliance (thenma.org). He’s a former chief at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed “Crack City” by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. In addition, he served as director of public safety at a New Jersey university and director of security for several major organizations. Kouri has appeared as on-air commentator for more than 100 TV and radio news and talk shows including Oprah, McLaughlin Report, CNN Headline News, MTV, Fox News, etc.  His book “Assume The Position” is available at Amazon.Com. Kouri’s own website is located at http://jimkouri.U.S.